Hi Friendly DHers:
The Dynamic Table of Contexts team is developing a semantic tagset that will be used to encode a collection of scholarly essays.
We are currently trying to incorporate this tagset, which is largely based off of Orlando’s tagset, into a TEI-based schema. We intend to tag sections of the text (whole paragraphs, single words, etc.) that corresponds to index-like concepts, such as ‘history’ or ‘politics’.
To tag these concepts, we have employed TEI’s ‘term’ element. The various semantic categories feature as values of the ‘term’ element, e.g. <term type=”politics”>.
The problem with using the ‘term’ tag in this way is that it is unable to handle nested quote tags or paragraph tags. That is, TEI does not allow <q> tags inside a ‘term’ tag, nor does it allow the ‘term’ tag to wrap around a <p> tag. This restricts the ‘term’ tag’s usage. Ideally, we want to be able to identify concepts across paragraphs.
We have searched for an alternative to the ‘term’ tag in the TEI catalogue but apart from customizing the schema, we have not found an adequate solution. At this point in the project, we are interested in sticking to the TEI’s standards. Is there a term-like tag in TEI that we have overlooked?
We would appreciate some feedback on this issue of semantic tagging in TEI.
ALSO, we are interested in tagging instances of genre in the collection, but again, TEI does not provide a ‘genre’ tag. Is there a clear solution here that we have missed?
